British Films 1: Seven Days To Noon

Part of The Knowledge’s brief is to draw attention to those films, particularly British ones from the 1940s and 50s, which have been somewhat neglected. The scenes of a dazed Cillian Murphy walking through a deserted London in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later are among the most fascinating and terrifying of that film; the idea that in today’s 24 hour, bustling, metropolis, a single person walking the streets is so eerie and out of the norm. A similar effect – in some ways more extraordinary given when it was made - comes in the climatic scenes of the Boulting Brothers’ Seven Days To Noon (1950), released for the first time on DVD earlier this year. The city has been evacuated, various shots showing how empty it is, with the silence only broken by the footsteps of the army searching for Professor Willingdon (Barry Sloane). Seven days before hand, the Professor had threatened to blow up London with a stolen bomb unless the Government agreed to stop all funding and investigation into nuclear weapons, something they can never acquiesce to. The direction by John Boulting and the pace and editing of the sequence creates a genuine tension. It is somehow made all the more chilling when compared to the opening scene of the film, with its cosy and utterly everyday image of a postman going about his business, bringing the letter of this warning to the door of 10 Downing Street.

Much of Seven Days To Noon has not dated well; like It Always Rains On Sunday (1947) and Passport To Pimlico (1949), it shows Britain in the age of austerity that followed the war – strangely coy and cloistered while deeply insecure and uncertain about the future. For the most part the characters are either stiff, upper lip types or salt of the earth cockneys. But in the central figure of anti hero Professor Willingdon, we have someone much more complicated and less easy to define; clearly not a well man, his plan of action is irrational and misguided, yet his thesis that the world would be better off without these kinds of weapons isn’t hard to sympathise with. In the Cold War era the film tapped into the nuclear fear in the wake of Hiroshima and the developing arms race. Although these threats are a thing of the past, the continuing global uncertainty means that many of the issues and arguments in the film still speak to us. So while the film is certainly a social document, almost by accident a reflection of an age and values that simply don’t exist any more, it is somewhat more than that; a thriller of great subtlety and ambiguity, raising uncomfortable questions and not very reassuring answers.

The story by James Bernard and Paul Dehn won an Academy Award and arguably created the archetypal plot of a villain threatening to destroy or hurt people within a certain time limit; it could be said that Die Hard, 24, Speed, Juggernaut and the rest all follow in the wake of Seven Days To Noon. Like Carol Reed’s great run of films of the late 1940s (Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man), Seven Days to Noon is the middle part of a Boulting Brothers trilogy, between Brighton Rock (1947) and The Magic Box (1950), which will hopefully now be discovered by a whole new audience.